Just One Drink Can Make You Pretty Dumb

Oops. It now looks like it’s not true that a single drink won’t impair attention. Forbes reports that research conducted at the University of Washington,
Seattle,studied the theory of "inattentional blindness,"
wherein an individual fails to notice an unanticipated yet
prominent object. Study participants, who were given 10 minutes to
drink a beverage that may or may not have been alcoholic,  watched a 25-second
video clip featuring six people playing ball. They were asked to
count the number of times the ball was passed between players. In the middle of the video, a person in a gorilla suit walked
past the players on the screen, beat on its chest and then walked
out of the image. The gorilla was in the scene for more than
one-third of the entire video. Researchers found that participants who tested as "mildly intoxicated" were
twice as likely to say they didn’t see the gorilla, compared to
participants who were less drunk. Read an abstract from the study in Applied Cognitive Psychology.